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Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters, one of the most esteemed roasters in Sacramento’s expansive coffee scene in California, has been tapped as a finalist in Roast Magazine’s 23rd annual Micro Roaster of the Year awards for 2027.
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The trade magazine, which describes itself as a “bi-monthly technical trade journal dedicated to the success and growth of the specialty coffee industry,” runs the awards each year. Micro roasters are those producing less than 100,000 pounds of beans per year, and macro roasters are those that produce above that.
According to Maxx Leekley, Production Lead & Inventory Manager at Chocolate Fish, the application process involves more than just roasting up a good bean.
“They’re really about sustainable practices. They’re about the business side of roasting, everything that happens before it even gets to the roastery, so trading with producers, actually talking to farmers and learning their stories,” they said.
Roast Magazine scores the applications based on a variety of criteria, including the company’s mission, its commitment to sustainability, employee education, its diversity, inclusion and equity policies, its involvement in the coffee industry and innovations in roasting, marketing and business practices.
Once the applicants’ scores are tallied, the finalists are asked to submit roasts for evaluation.
“They said, ‘all right, here are the three categories. One was just a production roast, so something that you’re already doing within your production standard, what you’re selling your customers. One is a blend that is not an espresso, and then the last one is a wild card, so just whatever you wanted to throw in there,’” Leekley said.
Working with their manager, Andrew Owen, the roaster’s director of roastery and education, they made the selections. For the production roast, they submitted Purple Caturra, a natural cold process coffee.
In natural process, coffee beans are left with the cherry, or fruit pulp, intact to ferment and dry. For Purple Caturra, the whole cherries are first stored in a cold room for 72 hours to slow fermentation, a fairly experimental process. The resulting bean has notes of coconut and tropical fruit.
“It’s a very strange coffee in that it kind of tastes the same no matter how you brew it,” Owen said.
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Chocolate Fish rarely does blends; most of their coffees are single-source. For the blend, Owen and Leekley chose a combination of Nicaraguan and Colombian beans, dubbing it the Tatari Blend. Tatari is Maori for filter, a nod to the company’s New Zealander roots. The blend has become sufficiently popular that it is now one of their standard offerings in the shops.
For the wild card, they went with another experimental bean, Pink Bourbon. This is a cold washed process bean, meaning the cherry pulp is washed away from the bean before it’s put in cold storage for 72 hours and then dried.
“That one’s just very floral. It’s got like lemongrass notes, lychee notes, just a really interesting cup. I think it fit the wild card section perfectly,” Leekley said.
Ultimately Michigan-based Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters took the top spot. While Roast Magazine wouldn’t disclose final scores, Chocolate Fish learned that they missed only by a very small margin. Non-winners are not ranked, so all are just listed as finalists.
This is not Chocolate Fish’s first time in the running. The roaster was also tapped as a finalist for the 2023 awards, when the company was under its original ownership. Founders Andy and Edie Baker sold the company to Ali Syed and Asif Alvi in July 2023.
“We hadn’t re-applied mainly because we were finding our feet under the new ownership. Obviously it was a huge change, so it took us some time to find that foundation and find out who we were under the new ownership,” Owen said.
Then, Leekley ran into Connie Blumhart, publisher of Roast Magazine, at the World of Coffee trade show in April, and she encouraged them to resubmit.
“She specifically was like, ‘hey, I haven’t seen your guys’ submission. We love chocolate fish, and I think you guys should apply again.’ It just gave us a really nice confidence boost, because she was reminding us how there’s hundreds of applications, and to get that finalist spot was a big deal. So we definitely are gonna keep pushing at it and try and get the gold,” Leekley said.
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This story was originally published October 19, 2026 at 5:07 PM.